The Only Problem

‘I’m only taking her for a visit,’ Ruth said. ‘What’s wrong with that? You went to see Harvey, Edward. Now I’ll have a try.’

‘Be sure to bring her back, Ree-uth,’ said Ernie. ‘The legal position —’

‘Do you still want to marry Effie?’ Edward asked him.

‘No, quite frankly, I don’t.’

‘Effie’s so beautiful,’ Nathan said. He got up to replenish the drinks. ‘What a beautiful girl she is!’

‘A matter of justice. A balancing of accounts.’ This was how Ruth put it to Harvey. ‘I’m passionate about justice,’ she said.

‘People who want justice,’ Harvey said, ‘generally want so little when it comes to the actuality. There is more to be had from the world than a balancing of accounts.’

She supposed he was thinking of his character Job, as in fact he was. She was used to men answering her with one part of their mind on religion. That was one of the reasons why Edward had become so unsatisfactory after he had ceased to be a curate and become an actor.

Ruth and Effie grew up in a country rectory that to-day is converted into four commodious fats. The shabbiness of the war still hung over it in the late fifties, but they were only aware of the general decay by the testimony of their elders as to how things were ‘in the old days’, and the evidence of pre-war photographs of garden parties where servants and trees stood about, well-tended, and the drawing room chintzes were well-fitted and new. Otherwise, they simply accepted that life was a muddle of broken barrows, tin buckets in the garden sheds, overgrown gardens, neglected trees. They had an oak of immense girth; a mulberry tree older than the house, to judge from early sketches of the place. The graveyard had a yew the circumference and shape of their oval dining-table; the tree was hollow inside and the bark had formed itself into the shape of organ pipes. Yews were planted in graveyards, originally, because they poisoned cattle, and as they were needed for long-bows they were planted in a place where cattle didn’t go. All this Ruth picked up from God knows where; the air she breathed informed her. House-martins nested under the eaves outside Ruth’s room and used to make a dark-and-white flash almost up to the open window as they came and fled in the morning.

There was a worn carpet on the staircase up to the first landing.

After that, bare wood. Most of the rooms were simply shut for ever. They had been civil servants’ bedrooms in war-time before Ruth was born, and she never knew what it was like to see the houseful of people that the rectory was made for.

For most of Ruth’s life, up to the time Edward became an actor, religion was her bread and butter. Her father was what Edward at one time called a career-Christian; she assumed he was a believer too, as was her mother; but she never got the impression that either had time to think about it.

Effie was three years younger than Ruth. The sisters were very close to each other all their schooldays and in their early twenties. Ruth often wondered when exactly they had separated in their attitude to life. It was probably after Ruth’s return from Paris where she had spent a year with a family. Shortly afterwards Effie, too, went off to be an au pair in France.

If you are the child of a doctor or a butcher you don’t have to believe in your father’s occupation. But, in their childhood, they had to believe in their father’s job as a clergyman in a special way. Matins and Sunday services and Evensong were part of the job; the family was officially poor, which was to say they were not the poor in the streets and cottages, but poor by the standards of a country rector. Ruth’s mother was a free-lance typist and always had some work in hand. She could do seventy words a minute on her old pre-war typewriter. Before her marriage she had done a hundred and thirty words a minute at Pitman’s shorthand. Ruth used to go to sleep on a summer night hearing the tap-tapping of the typewriter below, and wake to the almost identical sound of the woodpecker in the tree outside her window. Ruth supposed this was Effie’s experience too, but when she reminded her sister of it many years later Effie couldn’t recall any sound effects.

Effie went to a university on her return from France and left after her first year about the time that Ruth graduated and married Edward. Ruth worked with and for Edward and the parish, organising a live crib at Christmas with a real baby, a real cow and a real virgin; she wrote special prayers to the Holy Spirit and the Trinity for the parish magazine (which she described as Prayers to the HS etc.) and she arranged bring-and-pay garden lunches. She lectured and made bedspreads, and she taught child-welfare and jam preserving.

Ruth was very much in the business. Effie, meanwhile, went off the rails, and when this was pointed out to her in so many words, she said, ‘What rails? Whose rails?’ It was Effie who first called Edward an actor more than a man of God, and she probably put the idea in his mind.

Effie was doing social work when Ruth got married. The sisters looked very much alike in their separate features; it was one of those cases where the sum total of each came out with a difference, to the effect that Effie was extremely beautiful and Ruth was nothing remarkable; perhaps it was a question of colouring and complexion. Whatever the reason, everyone looked at Effie in a special way. Both sisters were fair with the fair-lashed look and faint eyebrows of some Dutch portraits.

It was Edward who introduced Effie to Harvey Gotham. Effie was in the habit of despising the rich, but she married him. They had a small house in Chelsea and at first they travelled everywhere together.

When Edward became an actor Ruth got a job in a university, teaching twentieth century history. Edward had a television part which came to an end about the time Ruth discerned that Effie and Harvey were not getting on. Effie’s young men-friends from her days of welfare-work were always in her house, discussing their social conscience. Harvey was often away.

‘You’re sleeping around,’ Ruth said to Effie.

‘What do you mean?’ she said.

‘I know,’ Ruth said.

‘What do you know?’

Ruth said, ‘I know all about it.’ What she meant was that she knew Effie.

‘You must be guessing,’ said Effie, very shaken.

‘I know,’ Ruth said, ‘that you’re having affairs. Not one only. Plural.’

Edward was still out of a job. They hadn’t any prospect of a holiday that year, but Effie and Harvey had planned a motoring trip in Italy.

Ruth said, ‘Why don’t you get Harvey to invite us to join you on your holiday in Italy?’